The PM of the company I work on, always asks me to estimate maintenance issues and since there are several legacy systems that I didn't build, makes this hard to get.
He says getting estimations for ...

I've recently started to work on an old project, that was originally written by two professors with no programming experience. Those professors left the project before they have finished it. Meaning ...

I've found myself in a tough spot as of late. Been working on a game with a programming buddy for nearly 8 months now. We both started off as newcomers to programming around August of last year, he is ...

As time passes I think that one valuable aspect of maintenable and escalable software is to be homogeneous. The same problem should be solved in the same way everywhere in the application. If there is ...

A client came to me with some features he wanted implementing. Easy enough to do what he asked. He paid me, I agreed to start on the start date and finish in 3 weeks.
The code base is a disaster. It ...

Suppose I develop an application for a given company of my own country. Is is better to code in English or with the language of my country ? I mean, if it is better to comment in French and name the ...

I've been toying with the idea of feature toggles for various configuration/access purposes, but have been a little unsure of myself when it comes to toggling something like a downtime or maintenance ...

While writing a data mapping function (import from csv (using TextFieldParser) to table), I used the sql table structure to generate the boilerplate C# code that creates the datatable and populates it ...

I've started a job as mobile lead in a 100employee company. Their Mobile products (iOS and Android) has been developed by external teams, and now they have decided to assemble internal teams, so I'm ...

New technologies can accomplish existing tasks in more efficient and powerful way. But sometimes old technologies cannot be discarded unfortunately, so more numbers of technologies in one system make ...

My situation:
I'm currently intern in a big company, developing an automation tool (for company internal use only).
There are about 30 persons in the team, but we are only 3 developers, all interns ...

I'd like you to share your insights of how have you successfully turned the direction of rotting legacy code base to modular application design where it's easy and useful to add unit tests?
What I'm ...

We all would like to work with good, easy to maintain code that follows best practices and design patterns. However, reality is far from ideal. After all, content on sites like The Daily WTF is not ...

Large codebases are more difficult to maintain when they are written in dynamic languages. At least that's what Yevgeniy Brikman, lead developer bringing the Play Framework to LinkedIn says in a video ...

A piece of software is a patchwork of old and undocumented efforts. There are no comments, no documentation, and the code is hairy -- it involves Unix shell scripts that check for dummy files and then ...

I have a project which will have basic and professional edition. The professional edition will have all the features of the basic edition. I am using git to manage the project's codebase.
I consider ...

Fake Scenario
There is a software that was released 1 year ago. The software is to map and register all kind of animals on our planet. When the software was released, the client only needed to know ...

For a while I've been maintaining an ad-hoc script to check code style against our project's guidelines.
I'm aware of AStyle/Uncrustify and have used them, but they are best for once-off code-style ...

Suppose one had a relatively large program (say 900k SLOC in C#), all commented/documented thoroughly, well organized and working well. The entire code base was written by a single senior developer ...

I am a web developer and at the moment am finding it hard to cope with long un-documented code written by previous developers in an organisation I work for. With the deadline gun always pointed at my ...

I have a file (or rather, a list of about 100 files) in my website's repository that is still requiring the use of register_globals and other nastiness (like custom error reporting, etc) because the ...

Web applications usually have a database.
The code and the database work hand in hand together.
Therefore Frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django create migration files
Sure there are also servers ...

(This is a general question but I think is important.)
How do you quickly understand a huge piece of code, say, a project with tens of thousands of lines of code (written by other people)?
Are there ...

We have a project that keeps recurring. The client expects us to run a website twice a year and this is happened for the last year and a half. I took the last working copy and based our latest website ...